I just completed a project I’ve been working on for a few weeks,
a vector tile map of American rivers based on the
NHDPlus dataset.
It’s mostly a demo project
with readable
source, but it’s also kind of pretty.

A GeoJSON vector tile server. It’s
at http://somebits.com:8001/rivers/{z}/{x}/{y}.json
You’re welcome to use it for light projects and demos, but it is
not provisioned for heavy use.

A thoroughly documented
tutorial on
building a vector tile server. This is the real product, my goal was
to learn about doing vector tiles in open source and share it with
others. With this code it should be pretty easy for anyone to duplicate my
map and adapt it to their own data.

Raster renders of every
single river. It’s too much data to serve as a vector tile map,
but it sure is pretty.

Vector maps are exciting. The proprietary map world is moving
steadily towards vectors; pretty much all mobile maps are vector
now and Google Maps is switching to vectors on the desktop. The
open source and data world is getting there too. Thanks to Mike Migurski there’s now an experimental
OpenStreetMap vector service that’s very promising. Also my
personal thanks to Mike: the genesis of this project was getting an hour
of his time.